Old Church Slavonic Online

Series Introduction

Todd B. Krause and Jonathan Slocum

Old Church Slavonic is the name given to the language that is preserved in
several manuscripts and a few inscriptions originating from the regions of
the Moravian Empire, situated between the Vistula River and the easternmost
extent of Carolingian influence, and the Bulgarian Empire, extending from
the lower reaches of Macedonia in the south up beyond the Danube in the
north. These are the regions of the first missionary work among the Slavs
by the monks Cyril and Methodius, who devised in the 9th century AD the first
full-fledged writing system to represent the indigenous language. The documents
that survive are primarily ecclesiastical. They were produced in a religious
tradition that used Old Church Slavonic as the liturgical medium very much
the way Latin was used in the Roman Catholic Church.

Note: this set of lessons is for systems/browsers
with Unicode® support, but fonts lacking Cyrillic characters.
Lessons rendered in alternate character sets are available via links
(Romanized and Unicode 3)
in the left margin, and at the bottom of this page.

Linguistic Heredity

Although Old Church Slavonic (OCS) is the oldest documented
Slavic language, it is not the language from which the other Slavic
languages evolved any more than Sanskrit is the language from which the
other Indo-European languages evolved. Rather, OCS is now thought to
be a dialect of one of the branches of the Slavic languages.

We may imagine that the community which later became Slavic speakers was
at some time a dialect group of Proto-Indo-European (PIE). When the speech
community became sufficiently separated from other PIE speakers to allow
for independent language evolution, over time their dialect developed into
what we may term Common Slavic (CS) or Proto-Slavic (PSl). Subsequently the
same process happened again whereby, through the course of migration and
the vying for power of different neighboring and internal kingdoms or
empires, divisions of the Common Slavic speech community became isolated
from one another. By the time of Late Common Slavic (LCS), three distinct
dialects had emerged: East, West, and South Slavic. Modern examples of this
dialectal division would be Russian in the East, Czech and Polish in the
West, and Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian in the South.

Certain linguistic features show Old Church Slavonic to be a member of the
South Slavic group of languages. For instance, the front nasal ę of LCS
retains its front quality in South Slavic, whereas it develops a back
quality in both the East and West dialects. Thus OCS has męso where
Czech, for example, has maso. Likewise, South Slavic retains the nasal
ę in the accusative plural of ja-stem nouns, whereas in East and West
Slavic the nasality is lost. Hence OCS konję in contrast to Old Russian
koně (East Slavic) and Polish konie (West Slavic).

It is supposed, however, that in the 9th century the dialectal differences
were still minor enough that mutual intelligibility was possible across a
wide expanse of the Slavic-speaking community. This view is supported by
the fact that the efforts of Cyril and Methodius were conducted through
the medium of OCS alone; presumably they chose this language so that their
translations would be suitable for conversion of the pan-Slavic community.
It is not quite clear to what degree the language of the OCS manuscripts
resembles the actual spoken language of the region. It is often assumed
that the language is the same as that which was spoken in the centuries
preceding the work of Cyril and Methodius; but by the time the extant
manuscripts were written, the actual spoken language was beginning to
diverge from the written language. Nevertheless, the written language
continued to exert an influence of its own, even beyond the regions of its
origin. For example, in the 11th century one finds in Old Russian, on the
geographical extremity of the Slavic community, constant stylistic and
lexical borrowings from OCS as its own literature develops.

Geographical Location

The precise location of the archaic homeland of the Slavs is little more
than conjecture. Most estimations center on a region bounded by the Bug river
to the west, the Pripjat to the north, the Don to the east, and the Dnieper
to the south. But there is no consensus, and these tentative boundaries
shift depending on the particular linguistic or cultural attributes being
discussed. Often linguistic evidence is cited in the defense of geographic
conjectures. For example, the words for 'yew' and 'ivy' are native to LCS
(Russian tis, pljušč), but the term for 'beech' is a loanword (Russian
buk, cf. German Buche). Hence it is assumed that the beech tree
cannot be native to the original Slavic-speaking area, and because the
easternmost extent of the red beech is along a line extending from modern
Kaliningrad (Koenigsberg) to the mouth of the Danube, the Slavs could not
have lived west of this line.

A few tribes mentioned in Greek and Latin writings from the first few
centuries AD are thought to be Slavic. The earliest references come from the
first century AD, where the terms Venedi or Veneti presumably refer to Slavs.
These terms appear in the Naturalis Historia of Pliny the Elder and the
Germania of Tacitus, and are maintained in the German Wendisch
as a term for Lusatian. In the second century Claudius Ptolemy uses the Greek
Ouenedai in his work De geographia, and refers to the Baltic Sea
as the Venedic Gulf. He claims that the Venedae lived to the north of the
Goths, to the west of the Baltic tribes, and to the south of the Finns. Later
the term Venetae is used in the sixth century by Jordanus, and then by
Procopius, to denote both the Antes and the Sclaveni. They are agreed to
have spoken the same language over a wide territory between the Dniester and
Dnieper rivers; they appear to have migrated to the area after the Huns drove
out the Goths in the fifth century.

From here various groups seem to have split off and migrated to the south
and west. The ancestors of the East Slavs remained for the most part
sedentary while the West Slavs pushed farther into Germany, though they were
forced to retreat over the following centuries. The ancestors of the South
Slavs pushed south into the Balkans and beyond to Greece, but were driven
back from Greece in the next century. The South Slavs and West Slavs
maintained contact over the region of Pannonia, but this was cut off
with the advent of the Hungarians in the 9th century AD and the eastward
expansion of the Germans. The South Slavs were isolated from the East
Slavs with the growth of the Rumanians.

Language Contact

LCS includes lexical borrowings from what must have been neighboring speech
communities. Political and military vocabulary items were borrowed from
the Germanic peoples to the west, such as Gmc. *kuningaz 'king' ~ LCS
*kŭnędzĭ 'prince', Gmc. *doms 'judgement' ~ LCS *duma 'thought',
Gmc. *helmaz ~ LCS *šelmĭ 'helmet'. A few spiritual elements
were borrowed from the Indo-Iranian speech community: notably LCS *bogŭ
'god' and *bogatŭ 'rich' correspond to Avestan baga 'god', Sanskrit
bhagas 'distributor' and bhagavant- 'honorable', and Phrygian
(Zeus) Bagaios 'lord'. Similarities with the Baltic languages are so
great that some suggest a common Balto-Slavic branch of PIE. The contacts of
the Slavic speakers with these three different speech communities provide
another set of clues to their original location.

The OCS vocabulary, for its part, shows evidence of previous missionary
work which had converted many of the Slavs to the Christian doctrine
espoused by the Western Church. This was achieved primarily through the
work of German priests, so that one finds a core Church vocabulary in OCS
derived from Latin or German. Hence OCS olŭtarĭ 'altar' derives from
Old High German altari < Lat. altare, and OCS crĭky
'church' comes from OHG chirihha < Grk. kuriakon. Other
terms were literal translations, or calques, of their German counterparts,
e.g. OCS ne-priěznĭ for OHG un-holdo 'devil'.

History and Documents

Despite the dialectal variation of the spoken Slavic languages, the
language of the church remained quite consistent. It also remained the
primary medium of the liturgy for centuries, though it underwent some changes
through the course of time. Hence the terminology Church Slavonic or
Church Slavic and, for the oldest documents, Old Church Slavonic
or Old Church Slavic. In addition to its use in the ecclesiastical
setting, Church Slavonic also remained for several centuries the literary
language in various parts of the East and West Slavic speaking areas.
Because of the Balkan origin of the earliest manuscripts, OCS is at times
termed Old Bulgarian, though this nomenclature has fallen out of
fashion.

There are no clear-cut events or finds that identify the period of Old
Church Slavonic. Linguists and historians, however, have for the most part
settled upon a convention. The earliest date for the OCS period is given
by our estimation of the missions of Cyril and Methodius in the middle of
the ninth century. The latest date for OCS is given as roughly 1100, after
which it seems that manuscripts have more linguistic variation than they did
before. Thus one may speak of the OCS period as extending from ca. 850 -
1100 AD. This is certainly an oversimplification, since the language spoken
by Cyril and Methodius must have been in use for quite some time prior to
their work, and there are later texts that show definite affinity with the
OCS discussed in grammars.

The OCS corpus, limited to this time frame, is actually rather small.
There are five manuscripts containing various portions of the Gospel.
Next to these stand three other manuscripts, in which are contained a
prayer-book, part of a missal, hymns, sermons, and saints' lives. The oldest
dated Slavic text is a gravestone inscription erected in 993 by
Samuel -- of Armenian ancestry according to one primary source -- who later
became Tsar and established the so-called Western Bulgarian Empire centered
around Ohrid in what is now Macedonia. (N.B. We take no position on any
ethnic/cultural association of Samuel with modern groups/entities; see our
Blog post
for details.) Several manuscripts from Russian-speaking areas are dated
before 1100, but these have such East Slavic characteristics that they
are excluded from discussions of the OCS corpus proper.

Old Church Slavonic Lessons

Note: there are great disparities in capability among personal computers in contemporary use. Unfortunately,
support for Unicode® and/or the
repertoire of fonts installed on your personal computer cannot be detected by a web server! Accordingly,
we have prepared multiple versions of each lesson; this set of lessons is for systems/browsers
with Unicode support, but fonts lacking Cyrillic characters.
(You may switch to other versions via links below.) Lessons:

Related Language Courses at UT

Most but not all language courses taught at The University of Texas concern
modern languages; sometimes courses are offered in ancient languages, though
more often at the graduate level. Slavic language courses are taught in the
Department of Slavic & Eurasian Studies
(link opens in a new browser window). Other online language courses for college credit are offered through the
University Extension
(new window).